Week 5- Quadruped Walk Blocking/ Poses

This week we got to start blocking our quadruped walk in Maya. This was definitely pretty difficult at first because it gets kind of confusing trying to keep track of the 4 different legs and how all the different body parts react to them. The front and hind quarters are doing different things at the same time so I really had to focus on one part at a time and treat each end as its own walk cycle for a while. As said in this week's lecture, what really helped animate this walk was first thinking of the dog's skeleton and figuring out how the bones move. This is how it turned out

Derek said this was looking good and gave me a few things to work on. First was to pull the feet in closer together, which would lessen the amount of side to side on the chest. I might also need to work on the timing of when the chest is hitting those extremes. Besides a couple other little pose tweaks, he said overall, the way shoulders and hips are going and the ups and down, all look really good. So hopefully when I get this into splined mode I can still keep the same feeling.
The other part of our assignment this week was drawing dogs in motion.

Coming up with more original poses to draw was even harder this week but I liked the line of action and silhouette in both of these. The first is the dog digging a hole. In the reference picture I used, you couldn't see the dog's foot down in the hole, so it was most likely on the ground and supporting some of his weight, but because I wanted to be able to see that paw, I think I threw off the balance and weight of the character.

Derek did say he didn't think the dog would be able to stay upright like this and that I should have the legs point outward more and put the weight back further. This was his suggestion.

Fixing both of these poses was definitely a challenge. This is how my my back scratch pose turned out

Derek said this was a cool pose, even though it doesn't necessarily say motion. He mentioned that the 2D drawing I did has a nice curve going through it but it didn't really come out that clear here. He said the posing of the arms, legs and head are good but overall I need to make a nice line of action.

Here are the finals